Shock (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 2) (2 page)

With every rotation of the pedals, John found a deep resentment building within him,
every patronising ‘thanks mate’ from some smarmy twenty-something in a thousand-pound suit dumping a little more coal onto the fire burning in his gut.

It was the anger, more than a
ny sense of chivalry or heroism which made him act when he saw her. By then, he just wanted to take his rage out on something, anything.

He was cycling through Farringdon, one of London’s would-be ‘hip’ districts, all business HQ’s and trendy, retro pubs. Saw her coming out of a restaurant maybe a hundred yards ahead. Hell, every man on the street saw her, a tall platinum blonde in a knockout dress with a face just famous enough that you knew
it, but didn’t quite know why.

As the eyes on the street swivelled toward her, John’s eyes picked up something else, a quickening of movement in the bodies on the street. Two men were hurrying toward her. He might not have noticed, but for the fact that both men were
reaching inside their identical leather jackets as they moved.

They got to her seconds before he did, pulling out the knives. One of them grabbed her by that long hair, yanking her head back, ex
posing her throat to the blade gleaming steel kissing her neck almost tenderly. In the distance, a few hundred yards down the street, a black transit van roared around the corner of Hatton Garden and onto Clerkenwell Road, weaving through the traffic at speed.

A kidnapping then.
Sometimes two plus two made four.

John didn’t spend any time debating his next move. If he had, the survival instincts that had served him so well
throughout his life would surely have kicked in and demanded that he leave the situation well alone. Instead, his mind filled with bleak, bottomless rage at the city, the packed streets, the fucking bike, and he decided to act.

The woman was screaming;
facing him, eyes wide and fixed in horror as John ploughed the bike straight into her. He felt the crunch rather than heard it; probably he had broken something. If she lived, she’d forgive him. The important thing was that the grip on her hair had been broken: the man holding the knife, the blonde woman and John all crashed together to the floor.

The men had knives, John had surprise. In his experience, awareness had
almost always proved more useful than weaponry. He was on his feet before the fallen man had even realised he’d been floored. John turned to face the second attacker, the one who had been busy waving at the black van, not even seeing John approaching silently like a torpedo. Mouth agape, the man stared at John for a second, the knife dangling from fingers distantly attached to a hopelessly slow mind.

It was long enough.

John went low, delivering a heavy kick to the inside of the man’s knee, grimacing in satisfaction as he felt the bone shift beneath his foot. The man was only halfway to the floor when John plucked the knife from his fingers, reversing it, smashing the handle into the man’s nose, sending a small explosion of blood across his face; turning off his lights.

The other one would be
back up by now. John ducked before turning, felt the air as the knife whistled through the air where he had been seconds before. People always aimed high.
Predictable
.

John drove
the point of his knife into the man’s thigh, and as the man began to fall, John met him on the way up, the ridiculous bike helmet he was forced to wear crashing into the man’s chin. He was out before he hit the floor.

It wa
s over in a matter of seconds.

Long enough for the van to close the gap.
John shot a glance at it as he got to his feet, saw the window sliding down smoothly, and knew what it meant.
Guns.

He grabbed the woman’s hand and dragged her out of her shocked st
upor and back into the restaurant, half-running, half carrying her as the bullets laced the unfortunate diners who’d gotten there early enough to get tables by the window and spattered their lives across expensive lace tablecloths.

Into the kitchen, through the back door, into the alley behind the restaurant, into the nearest open door, past a woman standing outside it smoking, her eyes wide, through a small office,
ignoring the outraged shrieks of surprise, out onto the next street.

Gray’s
Inn Road. Only a few hundred feet from the attack, but thanks to the uncompromising streets of London, slow moving and full of traffic, it was probably far enough.

John slowed to a jog, still dragging the woman, ignoring her whimpers of pain, and turned into a small convenience store, moving to the ba
ck, well away from the windows.

“You’re hurt.
How bad?”

The woman gritted her teeth, eyes shimmer
ing with tears.

“My hip.
I think you broke it.”

“You’re welcome.”

The woman affected a pout, and John felt it tugging at his genes despite himself. She was astonishingly beautiful, large eyes and lips, perfect cheekbones under a dazzling cascade of blonde hair. She looked like she’d been born, fully formed, on Photoshop. A model, he supposed, though he still couldn’t place her. He imagined that pout had worked a spell on many helpless men before him.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What did they want with yo
u?”

“It’s not me they wanted,” s
he mumbled, wincing in pain. “I’m just a way to get to my father. Who the hell are
you
? You don’t look like a cop.”

“That’s because I’m a bike messenger.”
He smiled, before looking up sharply at the door.

Sirens, in the distance, approaching fast.
This part of London was about to get locked down. John stood, starting for the exit.

“Stay here,” he said. “They’ll
find you. Sorry about the hip.”

“Wait, you’re just going to leave me here
? I don’t even know your name!”

“My name’s John. And I’m not staying. You hear that?” He nodded his head at the door, and the sirens. “I want no part of that. You’ll be safe h
ere. They’re long gone by now.”

John saw her open her mouth to protest as he turned back toward the door. He strod
e out into the bright sunlight.

Didn’t look back.

Two

“Wake up Pussy!”

John was asleep, and moving at the same time. It made no sense. His eyes were open, he was sure, but he saw nothing, heard little above the thunderous ringing in his head. But he was definitely moving
, he could feel the uneven ground sliding along beneath his heels, scraping along and taking in every bump.

He was being dragged. He could feel it now, strong fingers under his armpits. Someone was hauling him along, moving
fast
.

A faint light sprang up in the centre of his vision, indistinct at first but gradual
ly widening, coming into focus.

He seemed to be being dragged through a forest. It
was night. There was screaming.

The world rush
ed back in on a wave of terror.

The Captain was hauling him along, crashing through the forest,
making noise
. John’s heart leapt into his throat. He saw it then, ahead of him but receding, like an object in a rear view mirror, Rabbit crashing to the ground under the weight of three bodies, scrabbling at him like enraged rats, tearing at his clothes, sinking teeth into his abdomen, ripping him apart. Rabbit’s screams, rising to a nerve-shattering crescendo filled the woods before ending suddenly with a sharp
snap
.

His neck
, John thought, horrified.

Hound had served in Afghanistan with Rabbit. They were brothers
delivered from the womb of war. They came as a set, one never far from the other.

That was the bond that cost Hound his life.
That unbreakable connection that meant the sight of Rabbit being attacked led inexorably to Hound abandoning reason and rushing to his fallen brother’s aid. Unthinking, he ran blindly to his death, his frantic attempts to pull the monsters off Rabbit only serving to offer himself up to them. John saw the teeth clamp onto Hound’s face, saw them pulled back, taking half his face with them, revealing sickening tendon and torn flesh. Heard Hound’s scream; more horrifying even than Rabbit’s. Hound, the intense, scary guy who apparently feared nothing died screaming pathetically for his mother.

John found his feet then, pushed the pain and nausea of the concussion to one side. Driven by terror, he brushed the Captain’s hands away, stumbled to his feet, turned away from the horror, and ran, following the chaotic course plotte
d by Flea, Butterfly and Mouse.

John had run
from certain death once before, tearing away from the rattle of AK-47 fire, sure that at any moment the whistling of the bullets cascading through the alley that the commander of his platoon must have known they shouldn’t have entered would provide punctuation to John’s short life.

That had been terrifying, this was something else entirely. Guns, he could com
prehend. He knew he’d face them; they were in the contract he signed when he joined the army. But the insanity unfolding behind him lent him a speed borne of hysteria. If they caught him his death would not be sudden, it would be many long seconds of teeth and clawing fingers. An eternity of torment.

Ahead of him, maybe fifty
yards or so, another explosion, another landmine. Flea was not as light-footed as his name suggested.

Death in front, death behind,
and nothing to do but run and pray to a god that John had long since turned his back on. He charged through the forest, keeping to the path set out by Mouse and Butterfly, expecting at any moment to see one or both of them disappear in a cloud of fire and shrapnel. He heard
them
crashing through the forest behind him, heard the unhinged screaming, did not even realise that the screams were being ripped from his own aching lungs.

*

“Dishonourable discharge.”

The gravelly, sombre deli
very carried an accusatory tone that made his hackles rise instantly.

John kept his eyes levelled at the older man in clear challenge. What the
hell did this pensioner in a suit, all manicured hands and transparent smile, know about being discharged from the military, honourably or otherwise?

The suited man cleared his throat, suddenly looking uncomfortable. John stifled a smirk. This was the kind of guy who had made a career of
watching subordinates quake when he walked past; a man who excelled at breeding the fear that he was the one with the power to take away their employment. His weapons were more insidious than any John had used: a chequebook; a balance sheet; a fucking PowerPoint presentation. Already this meeting in a nondescript office in Islington felt like a mistake.

“Can you tell me
about that?”

John shrugged. “What
’s to tell? I followed orders.”

The old man frowned and looked at his paperwork. In his world answers came in black and white, in paperwork. Somethin
g was profitable or it wasn’t.

“You were
ordered
to kill unarmed men.” He sounded dubious.

When John spoke next, his voice cut through the silence like a blade. “That is correct.
And women and children too. They didn’t bring that up at the hearing. They never do. I’ve spent the best part of a decade killing anything and everything: armed, unarmed. Some of them close enough to get their blood on me, others who were little more than stick figures in the distance. What do you think war is? What you see on the television?
Smart
bombs and high priority targets? Ha!”

John snorted derisively.
The old man seemed taken aback by the sudden vitriol.

“B-but these men
had surrendered, they were under your team’s control. That is murder, not war.”

“Not
my
team,” John spat. “If I were handing the orders out I wouldn’t have been there in the fucking first place. I did as I was told, because that was my function. Failure to do so meant discharge. Of course, sooner or later, you’re going to wind up under the command of someone who can’t control his urges. Someone who puts you in a position where you kill or be killed and the idea of being dishonourably discharged suddenly seems more like a win than a loss.”

“What position?”

“I’m done talking about this. I don’t need to remind you, do I, that
you
contacted
me
? And you were already sitting on that file when you told your secretary to pick up the phone, right? This country is filling up with unemployed ex-army. If that’s what you need, why don’t you go find one of them?”

John stood, turned toward the door, stopped when
he heard the old man’s chuckle.